Psychology Development Adolescence, Adulthood & Quick Review
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Adolescence
Adolescence used to be automatically associated with trouble. Recently, however, researchers have found that adolescence is not always so difficult, even with all the changes that occur during this period.
Physical Changes
Pubescence refers to the two years before puberty. The adolescent growth spurt actually begins during pubescence, at about age eleven in girls and about age thirteen in boys. At this time, children get taller and heavier and develop secondary sex characteristics. Secondary sex characteristics are sex-specific physical characteristics that are not essential for reproduction. Girls develop breasts, widened pelvic bones, and wider hips. Boys develop facial hair, broader shoulders, and deeper voices.
After pubescence and at the beginning of adolescence, puberty occurs. Puberty is the point at which sexual organs mature. Sexual organs include the ovaries in girls and the penis and testes in boys.
Menarche, or the first menstrual period, marks the onset of puberty in girls. The average age of menarche for American girls is about twelve and a half. The beginning of nocturnal emissions, so-called wet dreams, marks the onset of puberty in boys. American boys typically begin to produce sperm by fourteen years of age. Girls reach full sexual maturation around age sixteen, and boys reach sexual maturity at around eighteen.
Earlier Onset of Puberty
Girls and boys in the United States reach puberty earlier now than they did a few generations ago, possibly because nutrition and medical care have changed over the years. In Western Europe and the United States, girls have their first menstrual periods at around age twelve or thirteen. In poorer regions of Africa, which lack proper nutrition and health care, girls may not begin to menstruate until they are between the ages of fourteen and seventeen.
Varying Maturation Rates
Puberty occurs at different rates for different people. In girls, puberty usually happens between ages ten and fifteen and in boys between ages eleven and sixteen. Early or late maturation can have the following consequences:
- Early-maturing girls and late-maturing boys tend to have more psychological and social problems than their peers.
- In girls, a correlation exists between early maturation and poorer school performance, earlier sexual activity, more unwanted pregnancies, and a higher likelihood of eating disorders.
- Both boys and girls who mature early use more alcohol and drugs and have more problems with the law than their peers.
Identity
As Erik Erikson pointed out, the search for identity marks an important step in adolescence. Adolescents may go through an identity crisis, during which they struggle to understand themselves and decide their future. The psychologist James Marcia described four identity states, based on where people stand on the path to identity:
- Identity foreclosure happens when a person prematurely commits to values or roles that others prescribe.
- Identity moratorium happens when a person delays commitment to an identity. He or she may experiment with various values and roles.
- Identity diffusion occurs when a person lacks a clear sense of identity but still hasn’t explored issues related to identity development.
- Identity achievement occurs when a person considers alternative possibilities and commits to a certain identity and path in life.
Adulthood
Certain experiences tend to occur in adulthood, including:
- Marriage
- Parenthood
- The empty nest
- The midlife crisis
- Menopause (for women)
- Aging
Not all adults go through all these experiences, and the timing of particular experiences can vary greatly from person to person. However, average ages for major life events do exist. Social clocks indicate the typical life events, behaviors, and issues for a particular age. Each culture and historical period has a specific social clock. A middle-class white woman living in contemporary U.S. culture may be “off time” for motherhood if she had her first child at age fifteen. In another cultural context or another historical period, however, motherhood at age fifteen may have been “on time.”
A midlife crisis is a time of doubt and anxiety in middle adulthood. Research suggests, however, that midlife crises don’t automatically happen when people reach middle age. The empty nest refers to the time in parents’ lives when their children have grown up and left home. Parents who have other roles in addition to parenting usually find this period less difficult.
Menopause is the gradual, permanent cessation of menstruation and usually begins between ages forty-five and fifty-five. Though many women suffer uncomfortable physical symptoms during menopause, such as hot flashes, emotional reactions to menopause are far from universal: many women have strong emotional reactions, while just as many others may not. Though men don’t experience menopause, they do experience a gradual decline in testosterone production and sperm count as they age.
Aging
Researchers now know quite a bit about the process of growing old. Some abilities and functions decline:
- As people age, they usually lose neurons in the brain, but this loss rarely causes problems such as dementia, which is a condition characterized by several significant psychological deficits.
- Vision and hearing tend to decline as people grow older.
- Some aspects of memory decrease in old age. This results from a decline in the speed of mental processing. Decrease in memory capacity is normal and is not necessarily related to dementia.
Other abilities and functions stay the same or even improve as people age:
- Crystallized intelligence, which is intelligence based on a life span of knowledge and skills, remains constant or increases.
- Physical exercise and mental stimulation can form new connections between neurons in the brains of older adults.
- Most people’s overall sense of well-being increases as they get older.
Quick Review
Theories of Development
- Many psychologists have proposed stage theories of development, which argue that people pass through stages in specific orders, with challenges related to age and different capacities emerging in each stage.
- Sigmund Freud first described personality development in terms of stages and believed personality developed by age five.
- Erik Erikson proposed a theory of psychosocial development that occurs in eight stages over a person’s lifetime. He proposed that people face new challenges at each stage: trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, initiative vs. guilt, industry vs. inferiority, identity vs. role confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generativity vs. self-absorption, and integrity vs. despair.
- Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development states that children develop schema or mental models to represent the world. He proposed four stages of cognitive development: the sensorimotor period, the preoperational period, the concrete operational period, and the formal operational period.
- Lawrence Kohlberg proposed a theory of moral development that includes three levels or stages: the preconventional level, the conventional level, and the postconventional level.
Prenatal Development
- Prenatal development occurs between conception and birth.
- Prenatal development is divided into three stages: the germinal stage, the embryonic stage, and the fetal stage.
Infancy and Childhood
- Motor development or increasing coordination of muscles improves rapidly in infancy and childhood.
- Maturation is genetically programmed growth and development. Maturation and experience influence motor development.
- Temperament refers to the personality features a person is born with. Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess proposed three basic types of temperament: easy, slow to warm up, and difficult.
- Attachment is the close bond between babies and their caregivers. Margaret and Harry Harlow concluded that attachment requires contact comfort, which is the comfort deriving from physical closeness.
- After conducting an experiment called the Strange Situation, Mary Ainsworth proposed three types of attachment styles: secure attachment, anxious-ambivalent attachment, and avoidant attachment.
- Separation anxiety is the emotional distress infants show when separated from people to whom they are attached.
- Gender is the learned distinction between masculinity and femininity. Gender stereotypes are societal beliefs about the characteristics of males and females.
- Depending on their perspective, researchers ascribe different causes for gender differences.
Adolescence
- Pubescence refers to the two years before puberty and entails growth spurts and the development of secondary sex characteristics. Secondary sex characteristics are sex-specific physical traits that are not essential to reproduction, such as breasts, widened hips, facial hair, and deepened voices.
- Puberty, the point at which sexual organs mature, occurs at the beginning of adolescence. Menarche refers to the first menstrual period.
- On average, puberty occurs between ages ten and fifteen for girls and eleven and sixteen for boys. Maturing before or after these ages can have adverse consequences.
- The search for identity is an important step in adolescence. James Marcia described four identity stages: identity foreclosure, identity moratorium, identity diffusion, and identity achievement.
Adulthood
- Adulthood usually includes experiences such as marriage, parenthood, the empty nest, the midlife crisis, menopause, and aging.
- Social clocks indicate the typical life events, behaviors, and concerns for a particular age.
- As people age, they tend to experience loss of neurons in the brain, a decline in vision and hearing, and decreased memory. People may also experience increased crystallized intelligence, which is intelligence based on accumulated knowledge and skills. Physical exercise and mental stimulation can create new neural brain connections, and older adults generally have a better sense of well-being.
